The present invention relates to environmental factors affecting an environment at any given time, and more particularly to a group preference arbitration system that allows the members of a group environment to influence, but not directly control, the selection of these factors of a group environment in a harmonious manner.
When building an environmental control system, most systems focus on how an environment can sense and respond to a single individual. For example, Michael H. Coen. 1997. Building Brains for Rooms: Designing Distributed Software Agents. In Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI 97). 971-977. Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI Press; Jeremy R. Cooperstock, Sidney S. Fels, William Buxton, and Kenneth K. Smith. 1997. Reactive Environments: Throwing Away Your Keyboard and Mouse. Communications of the ACM 40(9): 65-73; Lori Faith Craynor. 1996. Declared-Strategy Voting: An Instrument for Group Decision-Making. Ph.D. Dissertation. Washington University; Andrew Dahley, Craig Wisneski and Hiroshi Ishii. Water Lamp and Pinwheels: Ambient Projection of Digital Information into Architectural Space (short paper), in Summary of Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ""98), (Los Angeles, April 1998), ACM Press, pp. 269-270; Scott Elrod, Gene Hall, Rick Costanza, Michael Dixon, and Jim Des Rivieres. 1993. Responsive Office Environments. Communications of the ACM 36(7): 84-85; Jorg Geibler. Shuffle, Throw or Take It!: Working Efficiently with an Interactive Wall. In ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ""98), Late-Breaking Results: xe2x80x9cThe Real and the Virtual: Integrating Architectural and Information Spaces (Suite)xe2x80x9d. Los Angeles, Calif., Apr. 18-23, 1998. CHI""98 Summary. Pp. 265-266; Andy Harter and Andy Hopper. 1994. A Distributed Location System for the Active Office. IEEE Network 8(1): 62-70; Andy Hopper, Andy Harter, and Tom Blackie. 1993. The Active Badge System. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (InterCHI 93); Joseph F. McCarthy and Theodore D. Anagnost. 1998. MusicFX: An Arbiter of Group Preferences for Computer Supported Collaborative Workouts. To appear in Proceedings of the ACM 1998 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW ""98); David W. Pearce (ed.), The MIT Dictionary of Modern Economics, 1992, MIT Presss, Cambridge, Mass.; Norbert A. Streitz, Jorg Geibler and Torsten Holmer. 1998. Roomware for Cooperative Buildings: Integrated Design of Architectural Spaces and Information Spaces. In N. Streitz, S. Konomi, H. Burkhardt (eds.), Cooperative Buildingsxe2x80x94Integrating Information, Organization, and Architecture. Proceedings of CoBuild ""98, Darmstadt, Germany. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1370. Springer: Heidelberg, 1998, pp. 4-21; Roy Want, Bill N. Schilit, Norman I. Adams, Rich Gold, Karin Petersen, David Goldberg, John R. Ellis, and Mark Weiser. 1995. An Overview of the ParcTab Ubiquitous Computing Experiment. IEEE Personal Communications 2(6): 28-43; Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown. The Coming Age of Calm Technology. In Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing. Springer-Verlag, 1997, pp. 75-85; and Craig Wisneski, Hiroshi Ishii, Andrew Dahley, Matt Gorbet, Scott Brave, Brygg Ullmer and Paul Yarin. Ambient Displays: Turning Architectural Space into an Interface between People and Digital Information. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Cooperative Buildings (CoBuild ""98). Darmstadt, Germany, February 1998. Springer Press, pp. 22-32. These articles describe systems that have attempted to address the problem of tuning an environment.
Further related research is as follows:
(1) The Olivetti Active Badge(trademark) system [Hopper, et al., 1993; Harter and Hopper, 1994] provides a mechanism for locating and tracking individuals throughout a building using infrared badges and a network of transceivers. The system, as originally designed, did not include a representation of preferences, and was primarily focused on how artifacts (computers, doors, or telephones) might respond to an individual rather than a group. This technology could be quite useful in the present invention, since it would eliminate the need for a manual login or a preset timeout to trigger entrance and exit eventsxe2x80x94the system could simply poll periodically for the presence of active badges in the fitness center and locker rooms.
(2) The Xerox ParcTab system [Want, et al., 1995] also provides a mechanism for locating and tracking people who are carrying a handheld device. One application allows individual inhabitants of a room to vote on the quality or pace of a presentation using their ParcTab; the presenter can then respond to this feedback, but the environment itself does not respond to voting. A ParcTab could be used to control the lighting or temperature of a roomxe2x80x94similar to changing channels with a television remote control devicexe2x80x94but it does not appear that the designers were concerned with using this functionality in rooms with multiple inhabitants.
(3) The Responsive Environment Project at Xerox [Elrod, et al., 1993] explored how an environment might conserve energy by adjusting the lighting and temperature, based on an awareness of who was present (or scheduled to be present) in offices and common areas within a building. This work differs from the present invention in that it was basically a two-state systemxe2x80x94an office or common area was either empty or non-emptyxe2x80x94and the preferences of the inhabitants was not considered in its control strategy.
(4) The Intelligent Room at MIT [Coen, 1997] is able to track multiple inhabitants in the room, and supports a number of methods for inhabitants to give commands to the room. While it has some capability for noting individual preferences (e.g., not playing Mozart as someone is dozing), it has no explicit mechanism for arbitrating among preferences of a group of people.
(5) The Reactive Room [Cooperstock, 1997] is a shared telepresence environment which responds to its inhabitants, and has a mechanism for storing preferences for videoconference equipment usage. This work focuses on a very difficult problemxe2x80x94how a shared virtual environment might better adapt to its inhabitants, when the inhabitants are distributed across multiple physical sites. One way that the room reacts is to adjust a remote camera based on someone leaning left or right; however, it""s not clear how the room would react to different people leaning in different directions simultaneously.
(6) Cooperstock, et al. [1997], posit four important factors that affect any intelligent environment: the invisibility of the technology, the capability of manually overriding the system, a mechanism for providing feedback to users, and an ability to adapt to the preferences of users. The present invention meets all four of these criteria: other than requiring manual login, the system does not require conscious interaction on the part of the group environment members, e.g., requiring people to input their preferences each time (or voting on each song); the group environment staff can manually override the station selected by the system at any time; the primary feedback that the system provides is in the selection of music played, but the system also provides some feedback to each member with respect to how well the member""s preferences align with those of the current group; finally, the system""s primary purpose is to continually adapt to the preferences of a changing group of people working out in the group environment.
The present invention serves for allowing preferences of members of a group environment to influence the control of an element in the group environment. In the most simple of terms, the present invention includes a member detector, a storage medium and a controller. In use, the member detector provides an indication of which members are present in the group environment and the storage medium is adapted for storing the preferences of the members. Further, the controller serves for controlling the element of the group environment in a way that is dependent on the preferences of the members for the purpose of best meeting the preferences of the members.
It should be noted that the element may take on various modes that may be selected by the controller to meet the preferences of the members of the group environment. Ideally, the preferences each include a numerical indicator representative of a preference for each mode. These numerical indicators may be acquired from the members of the group environment by any type of survey or the like. In order to control the element within the environment, the controller first sums the preferences of each person for each station, yielding a group preference (GP) value for each station; then the system sorts the stations from most popular to least popular, marks the first M stations as candidates (where M is also known as the group preference filter (GPF) a parameter set by the staff), removes from consideration any stations for whom any single individual has a preference below the threshold established by the individual preference filter (IPF, another staff-settable parameter))xe2x80x94e.g., if this is set to xe2x88x921, any station for which any single individual has specified a preference of xe2x88x922 will be eliminated from considerationxe2x80x94and then randomly selects one of the remaining stations, where the probability of randomly selecting any particular station is governed by its GP valuexe2x80x94e.g., a station with a GP value of 50 is twice as likely as to be selected as a station with a GP value of 25.
To accommodate the situation wherein one or more of the members leaves or arrives, the controller changes the element of the group environment to best meet the preferences of the members that are present within the group environment. Detection of the departure or arrival of a new member may be afforded by any user interface such as a card reader connected to the system which allows the identification of any member who leaves or arrives within the group environment.
In one embodiment, the element within the group environment include audible signals in the form of music. In such embodiment, the controller may control the music by way of a juke box. The modes correspond to various genres of the music, i.e. alternative rod, hottest hits, new music, hot country, dance, world beat, traditional country, 50""s oldies, heavy metal, polka, etc.
According to a broad aspect of a preferred embodiment of the invention, environmental factors affecting shared spaces are typically designed to appeal to the broadest audiences they will serve while ignoring the preferences of the inhabitants found in the environment at any given time. Examples of such factors include the lighting, temperature and dxc3xa9cor in the common areas of an office building. In accordance with one embodiment of the present invention, a group preference arbitration system is disclosed that facilitates members of a fitness center influencing, but not directly controlling, the selection of music in a group environment, such as a fitness center. The system has a database of members"" preferences for a wide range of musical genres, a mechanism for identifying who is present at any given time, and an algorithm for selecting a musical genre that will promote members"" listening pleasure in an optimal manner.